A third U.S. federal judge, based in the capital of Washington D.C., ruled on Tuesday against President Donald Trump's decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program(DACA).
DACA is an American immigration policy that allows undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children to receive a renewable two-year deferral from deportation and become eligible for a work permit.
John Bates, Judge of the District of Columbia Circuit, gave the U.S. Department of Homeland Security 90 days to come up with better explanation for winding down the program, otherwise he would enter an order reinstating DACA in its entirety.
"Each day that the agency delays is a day that aliens who might otherwise be eligible for initial grants of DACA benefits are exposed to removal because of an unlawful agency action," Bates wrote, calling the Trump administration's move to end DACA is "unlawful," "capricious," and "virtually unexplained."
After the White House announced its plan to end DACA in September, federal judges in New York and San Francisco also ordered the Trump administration to resume accepting new applications for protection under DACA.
However, in February, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the administration's appeal of the San Francisco ruling.
Some 700,000 undocumented immigrants, most of them brought to the United States as children, had signed up for DACA introduced by the then Barack Obama government in 2012.
